ветер и кровь и серебро
by Hinotorihime
Summary: It's easy to get lost in the taiga. It's the wind, you know. (Or, Irina just wants to do her job, Eduard just wants to do his graduate research, Natasha just wants her brother to stop being annoying for once, and they all picked the worst possible place in Europe for any of that to happen.) [halloween fic 2016]


Irina's eyes are drooping closed, here in the warm, cozily loud taproom. She's been riding all day and camping for nights on end and her aching shoulders are looking forward eagerly to the bed she'll be renting for the next week or so.

"Stew," says the bartender, waving a hand under her nose to get her attention as he places a bowl in front of her, "and your lager, and I've got vodka in the back if you prove you can hold it."

Irina nods her thanks wearily and starts shoveling the food wordlessly into her mouth. She can feel the man's sharp eyes sweeping across her, taking in the fine-but-sturdy fabric of her uniform—well-used and dirty from the road.

"I've a laundry tub in the stable," he mentions.

Irina grunts and swallows.

"That'll be lovely, thanks."

He pulls his rag out of his apron pocket and goes off whistling cheerfully. Irina drains her glass and lets her head lean back against the wall: to all appearances, she's full and drowsing, unworthy of interest.

She recognizes the young woman sitting stiff and sullen in one corner, dressed all in soft furs with her hair in a loose but elegant updo: Arlovskaya, her name was, last time Irina saw an article about her in the newspaper. She wonders if perhaps it's changed recently, given the two men sitting on either side of her, alike enough in looks to be twins. Then she thinks to wonder what the Bolshoi Ballet Company's most famous dancer is doing in a 200-person village in the middle of the taiga.

At the bar is a tall, broad-shouldered man, trying and failing to catch the bartender's attention. His clothes are patched and his face is young and open. Irina dismisses him for now. Same for the one with slicked-back blond hair and a put-out expression, hunched over his beer two stools over, and the three women whispering and giggling at a nearby table, and a group of teenage boys chattering away and casting occasional longing glances at the girls. She takes a second look at where a solitary man in a thick leather jacket and spectacles sits hunched over a book, scribbling in it. He's tall but scrawny: no threat.

In the opposite corner from Natalya Arlovskaya, the farthest one from where Irina is sitting, is someone else in furs. These ones are not soft and expensive like the dancer's; the shaggy cloak looks like a cut and tanned wolf-pelt, draped carelessly across shoulders Irina's sure are wiry and muscled underneath it. The man's head is bent over the table, and his dark curls fall over his face, but when he moves she sees flashes of tattoos on cheeks and neck.

Irina's back stiffens imperceptibly: this is a border town, and that man is dangerous. It rolls off him like a stench.

"You!"

Everyone in the taproom looks up, flashes of fear or interest flitting across their faces. The innkeeper has a knife in his hand—thick—meant for butchering work most likely—and it's pointing across the room to the man in the wolf-skin cloak.

"I told you to keep out of my inn, _vilkalatas_ ," he spits.

Slowly, the man rises to his feet. His hands are outstretched, placating, empty. He's not very tall; the cloak falls almost to the middle of his thighs.

"I'm not here to cause trouble, Feliks."

Feliks snorts. "Your kind cause trouble by _existing_. Get out, or I'll set the dogs on you."

The man's eyebrow quirks upward.

"You think I can't take on your tamed mutts?" he says softly. Irina reaches under the table for her pistol, but the man's already made his way around the table and is padding toward the door, bare feet making no noise on the wooden flooring.

Feliks is watching him go, shoulders loosely set, and the man turns back at the doorway. The cheerful light sends shadows across his thin cheekbones and the dotted blue-grey spirals that mark them.

He smiles. It looks more like a dog baring its teeth.

"I suppose I'll see you later, then," he says in a mocking tone of voice, and he and his tattoos and the swirling edge of his cloak vanish into the darkness.

Feliks sighs heavily and moves back to the bar. Slowly, the chatter starts up again.

* * *

He corners the innkeeper at the same time an imposing woman in some sort of military uniform does, but Eduard Rebane (soon to be _Dr. phil.)_ has intellectual fervor on his side, and breaks in before the woman has a chance to open her mouth:

"That man, earlier, the one you threw out—"

Feliks's lips purse.

"—you called him something, what was it?"

That was apparently not what he was expecting.

"Huh? Why?"

"Vilk- something," Eduard says cheerfully. "If that's cognate with _volk_ maybe? But I wasn't sure what language it was in, it didn't sound Slavic."

"I… uh, no, yeah you're right," says Feliks in a faint voice.

"You called him "wolf"? Why?" the woman breaks in sharply.

The innkeeper glances at her.

"It's what he _is_."

"So an epithet of some sort?" Eduard mutters. "Or a nickname—"

The woman's face is set like granite. Feliks pulls his jacket close around his arms.

"Nothing but trouble," he says wearily; "all his kin are. Prowling around at night, stealing, hunting, frightening people dumb enough to be awake after sundown."

"Where does he live?" the woman asks. Feliks gives an expressive shrug.

"Dunno. Don't really care. Long as he stays out of my inn. Your rooms are both here. I've got your things in already."

He turns on his heel and bustles down the hall. The woman pushes her lip out and gnaws on the inside.

"Why does it matter where he lives?" Eduard wonders aloud.

"Because I want to talk to him." She rolls back her shoulders, the tassels on her epaulettes whispering against each other. "Are you passing through?"

Eduard blinks at the sudden change in topic. "I'll be staying here a while," he tells her. "I'm doing philological research on certain aspects of the more obscure village dialects that are often found in fol—"

She holds up a hand, smirking, for silence. "I see. Well. I hope you find what you're looking for."

"I think I shall," he says confidently, and shifts his notebook into his left hand so he can hold the other out. "Eduard Rebane."

"Vojskovoj Starshina Irina Chernenko," she responds. Her grip is firm; her eyes are a clear, intense blue.

"Move," orders a woman's voice behind them. Natalya Arlovskaya has a sour look on her lovely face. It doesn't suit her, Eduard thinks, but saying so would be foolish in the extreme. The dancer pushes past him with a bony, impatient elbow. Her furs tickle his nose as she passes.

"Rich women," Irina mutters, once Arlovskaya has disappeared into her own room. "The ones who worked for their wealth are as bad as the ones who inherited it, in my experience. Sometimes _worse_."

"University students don't really get much experience with either type of woman," says Eduard. There's a short, surprised pause; then Irina laughs.

(It's a very nice laugh.)

* * *

The small inn at least has warm water, thank heaven for tiny miracles. Natasha has to crouch in the hipbath but she's getting _clean_ , the water going greyish with the dust of travel running in rivulets from her unbound hair. The warmth feels good where it's soaking into her aching thighs and bottom.

Natasha _hates_ carriage rides.

On the other side of the wall she can hear her brothers bustling around getting ready for bed. Oh dear, she thinks gloomily. The walls are that thin, then—please, please don't let there be any honeymooning couples here. That would really be the perfect ending to a perfect evening after a perfect day of travelling, one of three weeks' worth of strings of perfect days of travelling.

Natasha _hates_ travelling.

With a deep sigh, she pulls her leg up to her chest, propping her still-swollen ankle on the edge of the bath. It's awkward, and tugs on her hamstring uncomfortably, and the swelling hurts again now the tight wrappings and stiff boots are gone. She digs her thumbs in, rubs, leaning all her slight weight onto the tight flesh. She has to bite back whimpers as she massages the stiffness from her injured foot.

"Two months' rest," she mutters grimly to herself; "two months of _this_ , this isn't resting."

It's all Alfred's fault. It always is.

* * *

The moon is dark, velvety blue in a sky barely a shade lighter. But it's summer, and the stars give off plenty of light.

The shadows are all long and pinpricky. One of them moves.

"Are you still angry with me?"

The voice, in the darkness, sounds faintly amused. A huge dog trots out from the edge of the forest and stands beating its tail in the innyard. Its huge red tongue lolls out, drawing cool night breeze into its furred body.

"I _told_ you to stay away, you absolute _tool_ ," snaps a different voice. There's no one in sight, besides the dog, and a small figure lounging on the back window of the inn, ears flicking and eyes glowing. "There are _boundaries_ —and worse, you made a _scene_."

" _You_ were the one who made a scene," the first speaker points out, a bit testily. "I wasn't bothering anyone."

"That's not the point!" screeches the second, and then the cat in the window jumps as someone in a distant house starts banging pots together.

"That yowl woke the whole village. You should let these good folk rest."

The great wolf—for wolf it is, and no dog—lopes forward, toward the fence. The cat recovers with the quickness of a child caught in the cookie jar.

"Not one more step. That's close enough."

The cat's back is arched; its fur fluffs up till it resembles a porcupine's spikes. The wolf, sensibly, drops to its haunches. The deep, human voice makes its chest vibrate, hair shivering in the starlight.

"You and your borders. Where have borders gotten us in the past?"

"Safe, and living—"

" _Trapped_." The wolf's voice is calm, the subtlest of undercurrents the only hint of frustration or anger.

"Look, wolf," snarls the cat. "Just because we have a common enemy doesn't mean I'm obligated to _like_ you. Do your job and let me do mine."

The wolf makes no reply. Its head is raised to the darkened moon, still and silent. Its nose points straight as an arrow to a small cluster of stars.

"The breaking point's coming," it rumbles quietly. The cat leaps lightly down from the window and pads over to the wolf, searching the skies with its own luminescent gaze. It doesn't dispute the statement. Whatever his many faults, the wolf's sight is an accurate one.

"The question," it says grimly, "is who's gonna break."

The wolf curls its lip. A human would have nodded, wordlessly, solemnly.

A pause. There's a rustling coming from the rain gutter on the roof of the inn; something squeaks under the window.

"Rats," the cat growls, and vanishes into the shadows. The wolf hears the soft squelching of teeth in flesh and slinks off, down the main street, lamps glistening on its dark fur.

Clouds drift over the velvet-blue moon.

* * *

Irina wakes up to shouting drifting up the stairs and for a brief moment, curled in the softest and warmest blankets she's used in months, she has the traitorous thought _Łukasiewicz is perfectly capable of taking care of it…._

The shouting rises to a screech. Irina groans and wriggles out of the woolen cocoon.

When she opens the door, tugging her jacket on, Eduard Rebane has his head poking curiously out of his own room.

"It's that one woman from last night," he says. Irina makes her way to the top of the stairs and looks down at Natalya Arlovskaya sprawled at the bottom, legs jackknifed awkwardly and a stream of poisonous invective pouring out of her pretty mouth.

"Miss Arlovskaya!" she says sharply. The other woman breaks off and squints irritably up at her.

"What do you want?" she grumbles.

"Are you alright?"

" _No_." And she fumbles behind her for the bottom step, using it to haul herself up until she's leaning on the wall.

"Tasha, I'm _sorry_ ," says the young man in the entrance to the taproom.

"If you were _sorry_ , you wouldn't have dragged me on this _stupid_ trip and gotten us _lost in the middle of nowhere_!" Arlovskaya yells at him. "Where the hell is my cane? Matt!"

Another man appears behind Eduard. He's almost identical to the one down below, although his expression looks a good deal less sheepish.

"You're supposed to be careful, Nata," he chides, squeezing past Irina and holding a thin, beautifully carved stick down to Natalya.

"I was," she grumbles. "He was the one who pushed me and I am _not pleased with you, Alfred Williams_."

She's leaning heavily on the stick now: her left foot, poking out from under her skirts at an awkward angle, is wrapped and splinted from instep to anklebone.

"Are you quite done?" says Feliks, appearing out of nowhere and making everyone in the area jump. "Only breakfast is ready."

"Thank you," says Matt. "Nata—"

"We're leaving as soon we've eaten," she says haughtily. "We need to get back on the main road to Saint Petersburg."

"Good luck with that," says Feliks casually.

As Irina brushes past him, she sees that his eyes are heavy and bloodshot, as if he hadn't gotten much sleep the night before.

* * *

Eduard has a rather productive morning. Ivan, whom he vaguely remembers from dinner the previous night, is more than delighted to regale him with folktales and occasionally peers curiously at the notebook, trying to pick out the shorthand of the margin notes.

"No one knows where they come from," he's saying now, while he lovingly brushes down his big draft horse's coat. Eduard is perched on the fence, trying to write with one hand and clutch his wind-attacked hat firmly onto his head with the other. "Some people say it's a curse, or a disease. Some people say you have to choose to be one, that you sell your soul to the devil for the power to rip your enemies apart. Those ones are the most dangerous. They don't hold back."

"How do you tell the difference?" asks Eduard, flipping over a new page. Ivan shrugs.

"I've heard that their teeth look human, even when they're shifted. And of course, they all have marking on their chests—" he gestures—"as if a white kerchief were knotted around their necks."

"Interesting," Eduard mutters.

"But all wolves are dangerous," says Ivan sternly. "Whether or not they have human minds."

"Do you believe in werewolves, then?" Eduard can't help asking.

Ivan shrugs again. It's like a cliff moving, the thick muscles rolling slowly back and down.

"Not really. But they make for good stories, don't they?"

* * *

"I don't get it," says Alfred. Natasha is sorely tempted to whack him with her cane.

"There's nothing to _get_ except your utter incompetence," she growls. "I'll say it slowly: You. Are. An. Idiot."

Matthew ignores them both and spreads the map out on the ground, a little desperately.

"I know we took the right turn," he says. "Al's pretty stupid—"

"Hey!"

"—but he knows his left and his right, anyway. We shouldn't be here."

Natasha leans her head against the side of the carriage with a heavy sigh.

"No. We shouldn't. So why _are_ we?"

The wooden sign that says WELCOME TO VOROZHBA in happy blue letters is laughing at her. She's certain of it.

"Woah! Woah, boy! Calm down—Tasha look out—!"

Alfred throws himself onto the horses' reins, weighing them down with his body, until the plunging hooves subside and the horses are left tossing their heads uneasily, emitting pitiful whinnies.

"Shh," says Natasha, and, "shh," says Matt, and, "shhh," says the man walking carefully out of the trees toward the carriage. His hands are outstretched and empty. For a moment, Natalya meets his gaze, locks her eyes onto deep-set, yellow-green irises. They're mesmerizing, she thinks dazedly, she could stare into his eyes forever—

He looks away.

"I'm sorry for scaring your horses," he says. "The wind's shifted again, so—"

"You're the one from last night," Natalya says abruptly. "The one the innkeeper threw out."

"Feliks and I have a rather rough working relationship." The tattoos on his face keep shifting in the corner of Natalya's vision, despite being totally still when faced straight on. Her stomach twists with unease.

He pulls his wolf-pelt cloak close around his shoulders—she supposes the smell of it must be what has spooked the horses—and turns his head to look into the trees. "I was going after you, to try to lead you out, but—well, distance gets all folded and tangled up out here. It's the wind, you know."

"No," Natalya says stiffly. "I don't know."

His blue-dyed lips tug into a lopsided smile. "It's easy to get lost, in this area." His voice has a light, lilting accent, gliding oddly into his vowels. "Didn't Łukasiewicz warn you?"

"Is _that_ what he was talking about?" Alfred wrinkles his nose. "No one ever says what they mean in this country."

The man's lean face takes on a rueful cast. "We have our reasons," he says. "You should be able to get back to the inn easily enough, and maybe I can embarrass Feliks into helping you out a bit."

* * *

The first person Irina went to was the burgermeister, who seems for one thing to be far too young to be in charge of even a small village and for another to be far too young to have such a perpetually worried face. Even a full morning's drinking hasn't erased the stress written all over his forehead.

"No one tells me anything," he's whining, as he tips his glass over and looks dolefully at the single drop of beer that rolls lazily to the edge and then hangs there. "It's Hermann do this Hermann do that Hermann go do the census for some forsaken hamlet on the crossroads of Nowhere and Russia because the population's changed because someone's had a baby and whoops we forgot to tell you no one ever _leaves_ —"

"It's very difficult to break out of the small-town mindset," Irina sympathizes. Ludwig looks up for a moment, expression startled.

"No, no. I meant, _no one ever leaves_. Not even me. I hate this place but I can't get out. I tried to go on vacation once and my horse got turned around and dumped me off back here. It's the wind, you know," he adds inconsequentially, and turns back to his beer. "I need more alcohol. Where'd Feliks get to?"

Irina frowns. "If no one leaves," she says, "where did all the missing people go?"

"The woods took them," says Ludwig dolefully. "That's how everyone here says it, and— well, I sent in the reports, because what was I supposed to do, but no one will go searching except Ivan Braginsky and we can't cover the whole taiga with two men, Starshina."

* * *

Eduard drops his notebook happily on his bed and sinks into the mattress for a moment with the sigh of someone who's done a good day's work and is ready to relax. Then he pops up again and sprawls on the floor, looking under the bed at the little nest of blankets.

"Let's check your leg," he coos, and there's a small whine in response.

Carefully, Eduard reaches under and wraps gentle hands around a tiny furred body. The wolf cub nestles onto his lap, curled into a small ball with its heavily bandaged leg poking out at an angle.

"You're lucky I found you," Eduard murmurs. He'd been worried, when he saw the blood: so much, too much— the last time he'd seen that much blood was when his neighbour's dog had killed a fox and worried at the corpse until most of the yard was brown and sticky. He couldn't just leave the baby there. Whatever had attacked it might come back.

He scritches under the cub's chin. Its tail wags.

"Are you a werewolf?" he jokes, tracing the triangular patch of white between its front legs. Its face is marked too, lines of dark grey spiraling around the pale brown fur of its muzzle. All together, Eduard thinks it will grow up to be a quite handsome wolf. Hopefully it won't even be left with a limp.

"I think that's the Starshina shouting," he confides to the cub as he wipes the leg down and starts trying to rewrap the bandages as neatly as possible. "Once you're asleep again I'll have to go down and see what's going on."

* * *

Tolys—the cloaked man—walks unnervingly quickly and quietly. Between him and the constant movement in the corner of Natasha's vision, she's quite out of sorts by the time they get back to the inn.

It's utter confusion. The soldier from the morning is yelling at several pale-faced villagers.

"You!" she shouts, grabbing Tolys's arm. "I need to know exactly where you've been in the last three hours—"

"What's happening?" He wrenches his shoulder out of her grasp, tattooed eyebrows going up up and up until they're obscured by his bangs.

"Łukasiewicz is missing, no one's seen him since lunch—"

The wind blows through Natasha's hair, tangling it around her face until she can't see.


End file.
